


objects in mirror

by kosy



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Complicated Relationships, F/F, Mundane Tragedies, POV Second Person, Pre-Canon, Relationship Study, Season/Series 01, Unhappy Ending, just to be safe!, m rated for references to drugs & sex, the tragedy of knowing you're so similar to someone that you stop looking for how they're different
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-13 18:33:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29033238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kosy/pseuds/kosy
Summary: You spend six years burning your way through each other’s lives, crashing together just as often as you fall apart, and there’s no reality in which this doesn’t continue forever.
Relationships: Allison Abbott/Jaylen Hotdogfingers
Comments: 9
Kudos: 20





	objects in mirror

**Author's Note:**

> hi everyone! this has gone on Too Long i've wanted to write allijay for months now and it finally happened. big shoutout to @cryptidgay, whose characterization of jaylen & allison has had an immeasurable impact how i see them (though we now have very different takes on the characters lmao!), and @tenworms, without whom this fic wouldn't exist.
> 
> warnings for less-than-healthy relationships, plus casual references to drugs and sex. thank you all for reading!!

1\. You spend six years burning your way through each other’s lives, crashing together just as often as you fall apart, and there’s no reality in which this doesn’t continue forever. The hot hands and the ever-present edge of teeth, the screaming and the insults neither of you will ever take back, the smoking and the band practices and the feel of her leather jacket under your palms, her name in your mouth and the nickname you’d never let anyone else call you in hers, the sweat of an endless summer. 

Except then, without warning, it’s late October and you’re emerging on the other side of your twenties, hazy and new and blinking the bright impression of her last moments out of your eyes, and the only thing in your mouth is ash. 

2\. Okay, so you hated each other the second you saw each other and maybe you should trust your instincts more, maybe you should’ve left it there and walked away,  _ no thanks, you look like you’d rather rip out your own throat than say sorry for anything at all; I don’t want to spend the next half decade trying to pull apologies you don’t mean out of your mouth. _ Except you’ve never walked away from anything in your life and neither has she; neither of you ever learned how to back off and keep your head down and move on, so instead you met her eyes and didn’t look away and she didn’t look away either. That was all it took. 

And, yeah, it was hatred from the start, but what’s hatred if not self-recognition through the face of the other, what’s hatred if not a mirror and your fist through the glass, what’s hatred if not her on the other side laughing and stepping over the shards and saying  _ c’mere, Allie, I know you didn’t mean it _ ? Hatred not because you were too different to understand her but hatred because you were trying to occupy the same space in the world, lip curled back to show the same teeth, the same fierce grin. Letting her crush your mouths together that first sweltering June night is the most narcissistic thing you’ve ever done. You did it again and again and again and even today you still would. 

The point is: you met Jaylen’s gaze at one party out of the hundreds you attended in college, and you hated her. Because of this, you weren’t surprised when you spent half the rest of the evening arguing and the other half in her bed. 

3\. The problem was that it wasn’t just hatred. You weren’t above hatesex and she wasn’t either, and God knows that was fun too, but what you had wasn’t just hate no matter what she yelled at you as she stormed out your front door the first time, the third, the tenth. If it were, you wouldn’t have kept coming back together the way you did, which is to say constantly, which is to say inevitably, which is to say you don’t think your lips are just yours anymore and your sternum isn’t either. You can’t name a single part of you that she hasn’t clawed out. 

There was a kind of understanding between you and her in your shared brinkmanship dance, some fatalistic knowledge that you would always return to her and she to you. Because she wasn’t hatred. Jaylen was a good song with bad lyrics, she was hot asphalt in July, she was sunburns and the smell of chlorine, she was hair dye and bathroom piercings, she was afternoons spent high and sweating with your cheeks pressed to the cool tile floor of your kitchen. Nails on your hipbone and teeth at your throat. She was strings buzzing on her bass guitar, she was a voice singing low and throaty, she was lips brushing over your ear, she was a softly-breathed  _ Allie _ late at night. She was an argument that didn’t mean anything and a drunken endearment that meant too much. 

She was yours, you thought, in a way nobody else ever had been. You were hers, you knew, in a way you had never been anybody else’s. You still are. 

4\. By the end of it you’d lost count of how many times she broke up with you, but you know you broke up with her just three times. You didn’t really mean any of them. It just seemed like the thing to do. Anything else would have meant that she’d won, that she’d gotten something over on you. Love was a game with Jaylen because she knew games were the only thing she’d ever been good for, and neither of you had ever gotten into the habit of losing. 

5\. There were other women in between for you both, obviously. Neither of you ever had any trouble picking up a pretty girl at a bar or a party or a gig. You and Jaylen spent more time off than on, so there were other women. Of course there were other women. 

It’s just that you don’t remember their names anymore. It’s just that you’d look up from your drumset in the garage and see her, standing relaxed with her hand resting on the fretboard of her bass guitar, or her, laughing at one of Townsend’s shitty jokes, or her, bitching out Teddy over some finer point of music theory, or her, already looking back at you and grinning, eyebrow raised because of course she knew what you wanted, and of course it was only ever going to be Jaylen, of course it was your bed she’d always fall back into, of course it would always be your hands on her ribcage and her closed fist around your heart. 

You were so alike, you twin summer storms. You liked to argue. You liked to be mad and liked it when she was mad too, liked to watch her face flush and her jaw go tight, liked to see what stupid cruelties you could pull out of her. 

She cared so much back then. Her anger flared bright enough to blind, and she never meant what she said, you thought, she was just saying what she knew would hurt you most, lashing out directionless. It didn’t hurt because she wanted you back, she never stopped wanting you back. Half the time your fights would end with your back to a wall and her tongue in your mouth and you both knew that was what you were looking for the whole time, so it didn’t really matter, and you both knew that too. 

6\. Did you love her? Of course you did. 

7\. Because, here’s the thing, everybody loved Jaylen in those halcyon years—loved her wildness, loved her brilliance, loved her undercut and her tattoos and the way she got mean even when she was at her happiest, loved her cocky grin and t-shirts with the sleeves she cut out with safety scissors just because she knew how good her arms looked, loved her obvious talent—everybody wanted a piece of her, but fuck, you didn’t blame them, you wanted every last scrap, you wanted her to smile at you and say  _ I’m yours, only yours, you know I am, I always was, _ and she would never say that because her voice didn’t sound that way even in your head. Those were your words in her mouth, your fingers hooked behind her teeth. But you wanted it anyway. 

8\. Did she love you? 

9\. She did, right? It doesn’t make sense if she didn’t. It can’t. 

10\. One night you say something a little too mean during one of your Möbius strip arguments, another fight that’s just years of hurt looped back on themselves so many times that you no longer know what pain was whose to begin with and what’s artifice and what isn’t. Your relationship is a body made of open wounds, and these days you can’t touch it without something starting to bleed. But you say something too mean, you get your nails caught in the wrong bit of ragged skin, and her face closes off. 

You don’t even remember what it was. That’s the most absurd part of it, honestly, because you remember her opinions on every stupid DIY punk band you went to see live together and the name of the bar she always brought you to on those rare sunsoaked days that your relationship was going okay for once and every flower she was gonna have in the tattoo sleeve she wanted to get done sometime, but you don’t remember what made her step back like that. You don’t remember what made her say  _ okay then, fine, we’re done. This is over. _ You just remember how she left—silently, with her bass slung over her shoulder. It hit the doorframe on the way out, chipped the paint. She didn’t slam the door. She didn’t scream a parting insult. She just walked out.

It wasn’t even the first time she’d said that.  _ This is over, _ she’d say, and nine weeks later you’d be making out backstage at some stupid gig Townsend had booked.  _ This is over, _ she’d say, and she would always be sprawled out in your bed again soon enough, stealing snacks out of your refrigerator, writing songs for you to sing back to her, draping herself over your shoulders while you tried to order takeout, disabling your smoke detector so you could smoke inside together and lie on the kitchen floor again giggling about nothing, her hand caught up in your short hair. 

_ This is over,  _ she’d say, but you were made for each other. Love means she comes back. Love means you are destroying yourselves in the same way. Love means you’re burning down the house with both of you still inside. Love means another summer. Love means it’s only a matter of time. 

11\. Except then, without warning, it’s late October. She hasn’t come back to you yet, hasn’t given you so much as a curt nod in weeks, and then the sun goes out and Jaylen goes up like flash paper. She’s ablaze on the pitching mound for two seconds and then gone. No trace except all that ash. 

You feel like you’ve missed something, like she’s spent years setting up a joke only to leave the room before delivering the punchline. Weeks later and you keep waiting for her to walk back in through your front door. Maybe climb in through the bedroom window, which you’ve kept unlocked since the first time she tried that stunt four years ago, just in case. 

You leave it unlocked still, which is stupid in a city this big and you know it, but. But. What about the two of you was ever anything but stupid?

12\. It’s hard to grieve somebody who’s still so alive in your mind. To you Jaylen existed as a memory more than anything else even when she wasn’t dead yet. She was your lover still but only in hindsight, only when you looked over your shoulder, only when you closed your eyes. 

In your memories you love each other so well. She buzzes your hair when it gets too shaggy and smiles and runs her hand over the remaining spiky fuzz, and you wake up with your limbs entangled each morning, and you still fight but you’re both grinning the whole time, and you make rough sketches of whatever tattoos she wants to get and she pierces your eyebrow in your bathroom, and every time she wins a game you tug her into a kiss with your hand fisted in the front of her jersey, and she loves you even if she never says it out loud. In death, in recollection, she loves you so much. It’s just that in the moment it never—

So you still know the bands she’d never admit she listened to, you know what she sounded like in bed, you know how she took her coffee and how she liked her eggs, you know the scar on the inside of her knee, you know every feather of the two crows tattooed on her left shoulderblade, you know what it feels like to fall asleep with your ear over her heartbeat. You know her. You know her. You keep her alive somewhere in your ribs, and you wait, even if you don’t know what you’re waiting for. 

13\. Then she comes back. 

14\. Sometimes you wonder if you ever knew her at all. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading this! you can find me on blaseball tumblr @fourteenthidol or in the crabitat, and if you left a comment on this it'd mean the world to me! <3


End file.
